Adata's XPG SX9000 NVMe SSD is its fastest yet

Among Adata's M.2 offerings that we saw at Computex, the most striking was surely the XPG SX9000. Besides the flashy red PCB and top-of-the-range branding, Adata presented this model as its fastest SSD to date. The company dropped us a line to let us know that the drives are out now in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB capacities.

As made obvious by the picture above, the XPG SX9000 is an NVMe SSD that connects to PCIe 3.0 x4 by way of an M.2 socket. The performance figures produced by the Marvell-powered drive don't disappoint: in sequential workloads, the drive should read at up to 2800 MB/sec and write at 1450 MB/sec. Adata also specs the drive for 310K IOPS on random reads and 240K IOPS on writes. That kind of random read performance could put it within striking distance of the classleaders.

Back at Computex, Adata told our storage guy Tony that the XPG SX9000 would be using Toshiba's planar MLC flash, and that a 3D TLC version would come later. The drive on display today is the MLC flash version, and it gets a remarkably high 1000 TBW rating—presumably in its 1 TB capacity. Although MTBF values on SSDs aren't usually looked at, Adata specs this drive for 2 million hours.

In any event, buyers of the XPG SX9000 will have the assurance of a five-year warranty from Adata. The company also says the SSDs will include a "cool XPG heatsink." The only question mark surrounding these drives has to do with their pricing, as they haven't hit e-tail yet. Adata's lower-end SSDs tend to offer good value, so we're eager to see the proposition offered by these more-potent parts.